The Romantic Poets (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

220 Pages·2011·0.8 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
THE ROMANTIC POETS
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: The Romantic Poets
Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Learning
Introduction © 2011 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The romantic poets / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-871-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4381-3863-3 (e-book)
1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English poetry—
18th century—History and criticism. 3. Romanticism—Great Britain.
I. Bloom, Harold.
PR590.R594 2011
821'.809—dc22
2011014749
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
“Thoughts That Do Often Lie Too Deep for Tears”:
Toward a Romantic Concept of Lyrical Drama 11
Jerome Christensen
Mysterious Tongue: Shelley and
the Language of Christianity 27
Leslie Brisman
Keats and the Use of Poetry 55
Helen Vendler
Time and History in Words worth 71
Paul de Man
The Secret Strength of Things 93
Jonathan Words worth
The Evolution of the Surface Self:
Byron’s Poetic Career 113
Jean Hall
“We Must Away”: Tragedy and the
Imagination in Coleridge’s Later Poems 135
John L. Mahoney
vi Contents
A Note on the Romantic Self 163
David Bromwich
Romantic Apocalypses 171
John Beer
Chronology 189
Contributors 193
Bibliography 195
Acknowledgments 199
Index 201
Editor’s Note
My introduction assesses the six indispensible figures making up the
romantic tradition in England. Jerome Christensen opens the volume with
a discussion of tragic delight primarily in Wordsworth, followed by Leslie
Brisman’s analysis of Shelleyan intersections with Christianity.
Helen Vendler astutely explores Keats’s attempts to reconcile his phil-
osophical emphasis on the social versus aesthetic concerns of poetry, after
which Paul de Man returns us to Wordsworthian concepts of time and history.
Jonathan Wordsworth then turns his attention to Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,”
tracing the author’s ability to invest the material world with spiritual signifi -
cance. Jean Hall applies a broader focus to the development of Byron’s career.
John L. Mahoney takes up elements of the tragic imagination in
Coleridge’s late work, followed by David Bromwich’s consideration of the
ramifi cations of the term romanticism. John Beer concludes the volume with
an overview of romantic visions of apocalypse and millennial transition.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
A William Blake
fter Jerusalem, Blake wrote very little poetry and devoted himself to his
work as painter and engraver. The most considerable poem left in manu-
script from his later years is The Everlasting Gospel, a series of notebook frag-
ments on the theme of the necessity for the forgiveness of sins. There are
powerful passages among these fragments, but they do not add anything to
Jerusalem as imaginative thought, and Blake did not bother to arrange them
in any definite form. The rhetorical directness of some of the fragments has
made them popular, but their very freedom from the inventiveness of Blake’s
mythmaking has the effect of rendering them poetically uninteresting.
Th is is not true of Blake’s last engraved poem, “Th e Ghost of Abel,” a
dramatic scene composed in 1822 as a reply to Byron’s drama Cain. Byron’s
Cain fi ghts free of natural religion and its fears only to succumb to a murder-
ous dialectic by which every spiritual emancipation of a gifted individual is
paid for through alienation from his brethren, the consequence being that a
dissenter from the orthodoxy of negations in moral values is compelled to
become an unwary Satanist. Blake’s very subtle point is that the covenant
of Christ, as he interprets it, takes man beyond the “cloven fi ction” of moral
good and moral evil, the “hateful siege of contraries” experienced by Milton’s
Satan on Mount Niphates, and into the clarifi cation of seeing that only a part
of what is called moral good is actually good to the imagination of the real
life of man. Vengeance and every similar mode of hindering another can have
no part in an imaginative morality, and for Blake there is no other morality
worthy of the name. “Th e Ghost of Abel,” which makes surprisingly eff ective
use of Blake’s long line, the fourteener, as a medium for dramatic dialogue, is
1